Now Playing

9/17/2013 12:11PM

Tesla Faces New Rival Model From GM

General Motors is developing an electric car that can go 200 miles on a charge for around $30,000, offering a challenge to luxury electric-car startup Tesla Motors. Mike Ramsey has details on Lunch Break. Photo: AP.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

I ... oh ... general Motors racking up plans to build a Tesla rival and perhaps more palpable price tag here at the details of the vehicle ... is are all the reporter Mike Ramsey he's based in Troy and I ... a ... it's good I'm glad I'd be great if I had a test or one of these other vehicles at the GM thing is still sore in the pipeline here in what way ... with this GM vehicle be someone like that Tesla what's their pain ... okay so let's Cornell Summly for both companies both Tesla and GM have said they won a bill that vehicle like this ... but neither of them really have proven that they can actually build a vehicle that costs thirty or thirty five thousand dollars ... as two hundred miles of range ... and all the current examples of electric vehicles ahead on the road including from Tesla ... in order to get back on a range you're talking about it much much more expensive vehicles so ... to get to that it's a it's sort of like ... it it's like ... setting the bar very high you may get there but you know it right now it's going to require dramatic for me to reduction in battery costs ... for improvement in battery technology ... neither of which it out when say it's impossible that the bars very high to get there ... and the biggest thing that doing this with you is it would make ... an electric vehicle much more palatable if the price down and ... it gives you a vehicle that potentially can be your only get one not just like a ... um and sometimes they ... ever have right now people sell an out of seventy grand around seventy grand for Tesla Model S that it goes that far to the two mile marker Mike ... was talk a little bit about that because if you plan out it would make the vehicle a lot more palatable to people who want the these long that this is that there is the other camp of folks who just say ... that's not why people people need that kind of brains they'd they drive the sword businesses often not more than seventy five miles why are we spinning our wheels so to speak to develop this longer range car with that on that ... what ... he did the great irony here is that GM has gone through this entire thought process and came up with his revolutionary vehicle called the Chevy volt which was designed to address this very issue ... is that people don't drive more than forty miles a day most people don't and a dramatically ... covers about it you know someone like sixty or seventy percent of driving ... that most people do in the day is about forty miles so they have the full moon and if you need to go laundering have a strange accent ... now ... they still haven't sold a lot of the zoo and Tesla came out with a vehicle that can go two hundred miles for fifty miles ... even that excessive prices to know if they think the average over eighteen thousand for a Model S ... people seem to be very interested in it so ... I think that the idea of being able to how a ... vehicle that is on fatter you don't have the two different vehicles ... is very appealing even at a high price so ... you lower the price even more ... I didn't get it into the range that more normal people can get to it ... by this vehicle and maybe you treat her what really happened or to make ... a mass market ... electric vehicle part this is about getting the call service battery technology down give us a quick overview of what current costs of battery technology are and how tussles actually different ... and the way he runs its batteries right now ... okay so one of the interesting things is not report about ... you know very often as the Tesla stands alone they've literally are the opposite of every other ... battery driven the electric vehicle in the entire world by every car maker ... tussling uses the eighteen sixty five ... aam ... battery lithium ion battery which is about the size of a double a battery and it's commonly found in laptops and cellphones ... aam ... and it's a he gets they have their own proprietary chemistry ... that they use a very common casing and they use thousands and thousands of themselves ... an account that are produced high volume in order to get the maximum ... of cost savings in a better use its huge battery to do this over ... with or ahead of everyone else someone else is using large high powered specialize ... batteries that simply are more expensive and Tesla season a lot of the ... type of battery that's less expensive ... they believe because they buy in such a large falling ... and because they've been working along or that they can reduce the price ... can get energy Vinci gains faster than the other guys of course all the other guys say no way they're saying you know there's too much ... wasted packaging and and there's always other problems that's why the whole other industries on the other direction ... you know it's gonna be Beery interesting to see who wins out on this battle because it could if Tesla wins a kid like not disrupt the whole industry absolutely I do you do we have a feel of way and Tesla realistically expects ... to have a mass market electric vehicle on the market might ... well they have said that they like dirty mean the end of two thousand sixteen then more recently on ... this kind of ... push that out with a further maybe a few thousand seventeen ... aam ... in L ... a and maybe even intended to God seventeen ... they I talked to J P problems their chief technology officer they feel pretty confident that they can they can produce this ... vehicle for thirty five thousand dollars starting price ... but you wanna point out that five six years ago the Model S with a fifty thousand dollars party to go the two hundred miles ... into with actually came out that fifty thousand dollars is actually sixty thousand dollars in and they quickly got rid of the sixty thousand dollar version now they're seventy eight thousand dollars ... so ... you know you have to be careful but what they say they can ... can deliver and what is actually possible ... RI my think semester being with us when you got that thirty thousand dollars on news I'm afraid of dark Tesla ... pursued on top of that ...